The main commercial company behind NetBSD is Wasabi Systems. The company has contributed advances and big chunks of code to the open source project, while they do offer a boxed release of NetBSD. However, their main business for the company is the embedded market and NetBSD is marketed as an embedded OS. Today, we talk to the Vice President of Wasabi Systems, Jay Michaelson.

Interestingly enough, however, if you are doing an application that requires a TCP/IP stack (most of those of interest to NetBSD users) both Wind and QNX use the NetBSD stack (that should say something right there). However, they are both earlier than the current NetBSD version. So, once you add that functionality to your design, the foot print is only marginally different. Certainly not enough to make much difference in the cost of components.

Also, once you get to older "obsolete" chip designs in the x86 world(like 386/486) the cost of the chip is relatively flat due to lower volumes and may actually be higher than a more modern implementation of a low end celeron with plenty of resources for any of these OS choices.

There are several ink jet/laser printer companies (well known and large) using NetBSD for their embedded OS today.